Matthew C. Nisbet: Communicating Climate Change -- Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement

Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement
by Matthew C. Nisbet
Environment

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To break through the communication barriers of human nature, partisan identity, and media fragmentation, messages need to be tailored to a specific medium and audience, using carefully researched metaphors, allusions, and examples that trigger a new way of thinking about the personal relevance of climate change.

Framing—as a concept and an area of research—spans several social science disciplines. Frames are interpretive storylines that set a specific train of thought in motion, communicating why an issue might be a problem, who or what might be responsible for it, and what should be done about it.13 Framing is an unavoidable reality of the communication process, especially as applied to public affairs and policy. There is no such thing as unframed information, and most successful communicators are adept at framing, whether using frames intentionally or intuitively.

Audiences rely on frames to make sense of and discuss an issue; journalists use frames to craft interesting and appealing news reports; policymakers apply frames to define policy options and reach decisions; and experts employ frames to simplify technical details and make them persuasive.14 Framing, it should be noted, is not synonymous with placing a false spin on an issue, although some experts, advocates, journalists, and policymakers certainly spin evidence and facts. Rather, in an attempt to remain true to what is conventionally known about an issue, as a communication necessity, framing can be used to pare down information, giving greater weight to certain considerations and elements over others.

The earliest formal work on framing traces back four decades to anthropologist Erving Goffman, who described words and nonverbal interactions as helping individuals negotiate meaning through the lens of existing cultural beliefs and worldviews.15

In the 1970s, cognitive psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky applied framing in experimental designs to understand risk judgments and consumer choices, concluding in their Nobel Prize–winning research that “perception is reference dependent.”16 If individuals are given an ambiguous or uncertain situation to consider, the different ways in which a message is presented or framed—apart from the content itself—can result in very different responses, depending on the terminology used to describe the problem or the visual context provided in the message. For many members of the public, climate change is likely to be the ultimate ambiguous situation given its complexity and perceived uncertainty.

Over the past two decades, research in political communication and sociology has added to this early work on framing. The research explains how media portrayals in interaction with cultural forces shape public views of complex policy debates such as climate change.

Framing a policy problem or issue endows certain dimensions of the complex issue with greater apparent relevance than they would have under an alternative frame. To make sense of policy debates, audiences use frames provided by the media as interpretive shortcuts but integrate these media presentations with preexisting interpretations forged through personal experience, partisanship, ideology, social identity, or conversations with others.17

A frame links two concepts, so that after exposure to this linkage, the intended audience now accepts the concepts’ connection.18 However, in many cases, a specific frame only is effective if it is relevant—or applicable—to the audience’s preexisting interpretations. For example, by emphasizing the religious and moral dimensions of climate change, biologist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author E. O. Wilson, along with other scientists, has convinced many religious leaders that the issue is directly applicable to their faith and their respective communities.

Alternatively, many climate change advocates have used an unsuccessful frame that compares distortion of climate science to the George W. Bush administration’s misuse of evidence in making the case to go to war in Iraq or formulating policy on stem cell research. Among liberals and science enthusiasts, this connection activates negative emotions, yet for many Americans, the frame either cuts against their partisan leanings, and is therefore likely to be rejected, or does not hold strong personal significance, ignored as inside-the-beltway bickering.

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